


Serve Your Function

by depressaria



Series: So Much It Aches [1]
Category: Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines (Video Game)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Community: hc_bingo, Hurt/Comfort, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-24
Updated: 2017-05-24
Packaged: 2018-11-04 08:27:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10987209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/depressaria/pseuds/depressaria
Summary: It was becoming clearer and clearer that not only did no one give a rat’s ass what happened to her, but they actually had a vested interest in seeing her burn. She’d be better off on her own; better to be truly ignorant of the complicated politics that ruled their undeath than to go into it with LaCroix’s hands covering her eyes.The fledgling resists LaCroix’s mind control much earlier on. Somehow, this doesn’t magically fix everything.





	Serve Your Function

**Author's Note:**

> For hc_bingo’s May challenge, using the prompts ‘burns’ and ‘blackmail’ from my card. Title from LaCroix's remarks if the player tries to disobey his orders.
> 
> I posted warnings when I posted to the community, but since the challenge requires warnings, here they are again:
> 
> Violence/descriptions of gore. Much angst over vampire dietary requirements which may be interpreted as disordered eating. The main characters are stuck with each other for reasons which may be bothersome to some readers; they're bound by a plot mechanic which makes one character obsessed with the other, and the other character wishes to dissolve this bond (because she believes it to be unethical) but can't without putting the first character in danger.

She’d done a lot she didn’t particularly want to do in the past few nights, but it wasn’t until she was picking herself off of Alistair Grout’s front lawn, nursing a pounding headache and thanking whatever higher power Kindred believed in that she hadn’t staked herself on his fence during the fall, that she finally thought, _Fuck this shit._

Pulling a paranoid old man out of his nest had seemed like it would be a simpler mission. She didn’t expect it to take the better part of the night, and she certainly didn’t expect to come out of it with her shirt in tatters and her back not just burnt, but positively flame-broiled. Which fucking hurt, for future reference. She spent the cab ride back downtown in sullen silence—she’d have preferred to think of it as a brooding silence, but she wasn’t in the habit of lying to herself—and sitting extremely gingerly to avoid bumping her burns against the seat. By the time she was standing in front of Venture Tower, resisting the urge to cover her nose against the putrid combined stink of urine (courteously provided by a nearby drunk) and her own charred flesh, she’d made up her mind to tell LaCroix to fuck off. 

Could have done without that overdone burger comment from Chunk.

It was a resolution that wavered somewhat as she rode the elevator up to his office, but it was renewed when she finally found herself looking once again into his smug face, listening to his supercilious voice. 

“First of all,” she said when he was done bitching about how Grout still hadn’t contacted anyone, “No one’s going to be hearing from him unless they hold a seance.”

“Grout’s dead?”

“Yeah, and I almost got killed by some guy calling himself Bach. He set Grout’s house on fire.”

“So Bach killed Grout to draw me out.”

She shrugged. “He acted like he didn’t know the guy was already dead.” Well, deader. 

“Who else would have killed Grout?”

She opened her mouth to respond, but as he looked at her impatiently, her stomach dropped.

Because there was something beyond her headache and extra-crispy back chipping away at her concentration—she could feel it pressing against her skull, buzzing in her ears, dimming the edges of her vision. The asshole had probably been doing it at all along. She should have realized sooner; she’d used the same ability herself a few times now over the past couple of weeks to get herself out of tight corners, though so far her baby vampire version of it wasn’t working on other vampires.

Yeah, there was definitely nothing fishy going on at all. “No clue,” she said blandly. “The place was a mess. He could have been dead for a long time.”

The buzzing got so loud she could no longer hear the street traffic outside, then shut off completely—which wasn’t as much of a relief as she would have thought. Without the constant pressure on her skull, she was once again fully aware of just how badly she’d fucked up her back. Her only hope was that she was shedding a few crispy vampire bits all over his immaculate flooring.

“Look at me,” he said.

She obliged, but nothing much happened. 

“You must be pretty pleased with yourself right about now,” he said stiffly. 

“Look,” she said. “I’m not trying to mess with you. I just want you to tell me we’re even so that I can get on with my life and try to figure this all out. I know you’re pissed that my sire didn’t ask your permission or whatever, but I wasn’t consulted, either.” 

“I don’t believe you’re fully aware of how little you matter. The only reason you’re still standing is because of—“ 

“—because if you’d executed me, it would have started something you knew you couldn’t finish. And from how hard you’ve been trying to get me to trip and fall on a stake, I’m guessing it’s still a risk you don’t want to take.” When he didn’t respond, she added, “I’m done. Have a nice life.”

As she headed for the door, she flipped him the bird. Respectfully.

“If that’s really the way you feel, then I suppose I’ll just have to wish you luck in your future endeavors,” he called after her. “My sympathies regarding your ghoul.” 

She paused. “My ghoul is fine, thanks.” 

“It’s a dangerous world for a childe without a sire. Few survive their first decade on their own, let alone manage to keep progeny of their own alive.” 

The throbbing of her burns, which had become somewhat less insistent once she’d hopped up on her high horse, came back with a vengeance. “What do you want?” 

~*~*~*~

Heather was sleeping when she got back to the apartment, which was kind of a relief. It was uncomfortable at the best of times to have her springing up to greet her like an excited dog, but after the night she’d had, she didn’t know if she could stand it. 

She ended up heading to the bathroom to take a look in the mirror at the burns on her back. Which she instantly regretted, because they looked even nastier than they felt, and they weren’t healing. The sight made the dull throbbing in her head intensify, so she tried to put it out of her mind as she made her way back out to the kitchen to get a snack.

The stack of blood packs in the fridge was smaller than she remembered—and with the way she was pissing off her ‘employer’, she doubted she’d be able to afford more any time soon—but there was no getting around the fact that she needed to eat if she wanted to heal. After a moment of thought, she poured the contents of one pack into a glass. Because she was classy like that.

What she had wanted to do was tell LaCroix to fuck off, then figure out a way to get Heather back to her normal life, then just… try to adjust. It felt like she hadn’t had even a single moment to herself, and while at first she’d been willing to roll with it because she thought she’d need a mentor or patron to show her the ropes, it was becoming clearer and clearer that not only did no one give a rat’s ass what happened to her, but they actually had a vested interest in seeing her burn. She’d be better off on her own; better to be truly ignorant of the complicated politics that ruled their undeath than to go into it with LaCroix’s hands covering her eyes. 

She sipped her glass of blood as slowly as she could, but by the time she was working over the dregs, her back was still just this side of being charred like an overdone burger. It went without saying that she was still fucking hungry, to boot. 

If sunrise wasn’t less than an hour away, she’d leave and try to find somewhere else to hole up for the day. She could _hear_ Heather’s heart beating (slow and strong like it was taunting her) in the bedroom upstairs, smell the richness of her blood. Could almost taste the iron. 

It wasn’t that she’d expected it to be glamorous. Being arrested by the vampire government minutes after waking up weak and thirsty in a shitty motel room where she’d had a lukewarm one-night-stand had set the bar pretty low. In life, she’d seen her fair share of vampire films, everything from Dracula to True Blood to shitty fucking Twilight. She wasn’t too proud to admit that she’d been the kind of geek who’d thought about what vampirism would realistically be like; she knew it wouldn’t be all superpowers and immortality. There’d be Thirst, sadness over losing mortality, questions about what makes a human a human, blah blah blah. It’s not like she’d been expecting to wake up as a Stephenie Meyer-style vampire, all twee and sparkly and suddenly wealthy. She just hadn’t expected to wake up as Melinda Clarke in Return of the Living Dead 3. 

(Nor had she expected being able to make people puke their literal guts up with her brain, but, again, that was something that would be a lot more interesting if it didn’t make her _so fucking hungry_ to use any of her fancy new powers.)

Heather began stirring, and the fledgling sat as still as possible—which, post-embrace, was pretty fucking still, despite the distracting throbbing of the burns—trying not to race up the stairs and… Also trying not to think of what she’d do if she let herself race up the stairs. Jack had talked about The Beast, and it had sounded stupid as hell at the time, but that had been with no knowledge of what her life would really be like from then on, not to mention with a belly full of blood. Good blood, too, not the bagged shit Vandal charged an arm and a leg for. 

Now it sounded a lot more plausible. 

She wondered how many fledglings ended up going nuts from the hunger and being put down by the capes. 

“Oh my god,” Heather said by way of greeting when she descended the stairs. The chick had great bedside manner. “What happened to you?”

“Fire,” the fledgling said. “Some douchebag tried to torch me. I’ll heal.”

“What douchebag?” she asked, already headed to the kitchen to retrieve the opened bag of blood. 

“Just a douchebag,” the fledgling said evasively, not liking the hard edge to Heather’s voice. The last thing she needed was her going after some nutjob vampire hunter when they were both already on the Prince’s shit list.

Heather handed her a new glass of blood, but she was frowning as she did. “It’s not gonna be enough.” 

“It’ll be fine,” she lied. This time she couldn’t bother sipping the shit. She chugged it like it was a beer and she was a freshman during pledge week, except it went down about a hundred times easier. “I just need time.”

But Heather had sat down next to her and was staring at her, eyes a disconcerting mixture of earnest and intense. And before the fledgling could do anything—which said something about how much this whole bullshit night had taken out of her—she carved a cut across her palm and dripped the blood into the glass. The bagged stuff still clinging to the side of the glass looked old and congealed next to it. She’d cut deeply and the glass filled quickly, and when the fledgling drained it she filled it again, and again, until the burns were gone and the hunger had quieted. She could still smell burnt hair and clothing, but those were far less offensive than burnt dead flesh.

All in all, it was less blood than would have been contained in one of the overpriced bags Vandal sold. Maybe fresh blood was more effective, or maybe ghouls’ blood was more nutritious or something. Either way, it felt like a luxury, like eating an entire tube of raw cookie dough and chasing it with a chocolate chip cookie dough milkshake, and the absence of pain and hunger was the best high she’d had since… ever. 

So of course her brain had to go and ruin the moment by reminding her that she was never going to eat cookie dough again. No more junk food when she’d had her heart broken and needed to pig out and watch bad made-for-tv movies. Maybe she’d never again go through something so mundane as heartbreak; maybe all of her stress now would come from unnecessarily complicated vampire politics. Granted, she’d be nuts to rank heartbreak as more pressing than being blackmailed by a vampire politician who’d be holding her life in his hands even if he hadn’t chosen to hold her ghoul’s life over her head too. But if she were human, the latter would be off the table.

“You shouldn’t go opening a vein every time I have a scraped knee,” she told Heather. Which was probably kind of a pointless thing to say when her wounds were already healed, but it was still true. 

Heather was looking at her tenderly this time, cut on her palm already healing. “But I want to, really. I’d do anything for you,” she said breathlessly, running her thumb possessively over her half-healed palm. It was like she wasn’t even thinking about the shit that came out of her mouth.

She would have puked if wasting blood wouldn’t have made her feel worse.

~*~*~*~

Under different circumstances, she probably would have enjoyed talking to Beckett.

As it was, she spent the whole conversation sick to her stomach, figuring that the missing sarcophagus would give LaCroix a convenient opportunity to throw her to the wolves. 

She was actually relieved when he deigned to send her on another wild goose chase, and that made her feel even sicker. 

~*~*~*~

The worst part was that if she and Heather had met at literally any other time, she thinks they would have liked each other for real.

Not just this ghoulish blood bond bullshit, where Heather needed her vamp blood fix and the fledgling needed her daily reminder that she could still do good things and save lives, but something really real. There were moments when she saw the real Heather, and that was someone she wished she could get to know; the girl who wanted to be a fashion designer, not the one who wanted to spend the rest of eternity as some loser’s Renfield. 

It was just… hints. Like how sometimes, before she got back to the apartment, she’d hear Heather laugh quietly to herself while watching some dumb movie on the TV. Or like how she’d label everything in the fridge with their names, even though the fledgling obviously wasn’t going to drink the kale juice and Heather obviously wasn’t going to drink the blood. 

They were both fucked over either way. Either Heather got stuck in this half-life for the foreseeable future and the fledgling got stuck knowing she trapped her there, or Heather died a gruesome death after being sent away to… what, exactly? Assuage her guilt? How fucking selfish would that be?

She’d just wanted to help her. That was it. She just didn’t want to see Heather die alone in an overcrowded clinic, and somehow that meant both of them had to be punished.

Hollywood made her wonder if there was a way to wriggle out of the situation, like maybe just taking Heather and bailing, then trying to dissolve the blood bond or whatever once they were in Alaska. Except then there was all that talk of barons and favors for favors, and she realized that it would probably be the same wherever she went. She wasn’t so naive as to let herself think that there might be somewhere she could go where there wasn’t at least one vampire swanning around calling themselves one title or another, and it was becoming clearer and clearer that wherever she went, red tape would follow. The best she could hope for would be living in some pissant town in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by fundamentalist christians and werewolves. 

Which, again, was not the life she wanted for herself or Heather or anyone. Except maybe some of the douchebags who’d been pulling the strings that got her into this situation to begin with.

She made sure she was gone afterwards, but she let Samantha make the call.

~*~*~*~

They weren’t so crass as to let her catch a guard standing menacingly outside her apartment building, but her mail was always damaged, and they always made sure that she could smell that they’d been skulking around the building. 

The stupid chessboard emails didn’t stop. She tried to reply to one—a long-winded, admittedly bratty message sarcastically thanking the mysterious sender for the reminder that she was everyone’s pawn—but the email returned to her, unable to reach its intended recipient.

She knew she was showing, in the worst ways possible, that all of this was getting her, but she couldn’t bring herself to shut up and keep her head down. In life, she was the first to admit that she wasn’t the most well-adjusted person, but she was holding up under the pressure of death about as well as an actual dead person. 

Which was to say that she was fraying badly. 

Sometimes she was surprised that she wasn’t actually falling apart like she’d hit the climax of a Cronenberg film, leaving bits of scalp in her bed and teeth in her bathroom, burns blistering back to life on her back once she’d used up her borrowed blood, eyes going all wonky like her sire had been Nosferatu all along. Which was overdramatic, but at least that was something she’d been in life, too. She’d never been this pathetic thing that sat obediently on some corporate dirtbag’s leash and bit on command, going out of her mind trying so hard to be mindlessly loyal. 

Some nights, she wished she’d never walked into that clinic. Let Mercurio suck it up, let Lily rot, let Bertram figure the Kuei-Jin shit out on his own, let LaCroix mop the egg off his own fucking face if that werewolf blood turned out to be real. Let Heather live whatever life she was supposed to live, no matter how short.

Those nights just made her feel that much worse when she had to face the next.

~*~*~*~

Heather started bringing home blood packs. She said she’d gotten a job at the blood bank—which was _not_ what the fledgling had had in mind when she told her she should do something with her time besides play homemaker—but who knew if that was really true. For all she knew, Heather was getting freebies in exchange for bringing Vandal replacements for his garden. She seemed to have an easy enough time locking that guy in their bathroom.

Which wasn’t a fair thing for her to think, she knew. It was her fault Heather was like this, and her fault they were in this situation together. But the thought remained. 

She tried asking around, as casually as she could, how often most vampires ate. The answers she got were about as useful as she could have expected; Knox and Mercurio didn’t really know, Jeanette thought her adorable for asking, V.V. got misty-eyed (as much as a vampire can get misty-eyed, anyways) and sent her another poem the next night, and Damsel told her to ask her cammy friends. Vandal said something pretentiously creepy about _Desmodus rotundus_ ever-suckling at Nyx’s weeping stigmata that, embarrassingly, made her mouth water and fangs itch. 

“You’re just gonna have to get used to it, kiddo,” Jack told her, seeming only half-glib. Which was, unfortunately, the most useful thing she got out of anyone. 

What she assumed—or perhaps only hoped—was that it would get better. That her profound hunger was a symptom of being a _new_ vampire rather than of vampirism itself. That maybe once she was a couple of centuries old she wouldn’t need to drink much at all, that the hunger wouldn’t consume her waking hours the way it did now. She certainly didn’t see LaCroix or Strauss carrying around sippy cups of blood like Lululemon-bedecked trophy moms clutching green smoothies. 

Heather came home at dusk in scrubs smelling of death and antiseptic, her purse full of slightly chilled bags of blood which she stacked in the fridge as casually as stocking it with a six pack of beer, and it had to be endurable because she had to endure it. 

~*~*~*~

All she could think about, as Beckett and LaCroix discussed the sarcophagus she’d retrieved, was that she hoped Mira made it.

When she got home, Heather gave her a note, which she said someone outside the blood bank had given to her to deliver. 

The note was one of V.V.’s crappy poems—this god awful one she’d written after the fledgling talked to her about their diet, full of crap about absentee fathers and caged ravens—printed out on cheap copy paper that smelled like the internet café she’d found Death Mask Productions’ studio in. 

It was about as subtle as a shotgun blast to the chest.

~*~*~*~

LaCroix told her to clear out the Hallowbrook Hotel, and as she stood there numbly, something cold settled in the pit of her stomach.

She thought of heading into the bowels of the burned out hotel, all the rotting wood and mildewed upholstery, newly embraced Sabbat half-crazed with hunger, brainwashed kine throwing themselves on her in hopes of being allowed to become like her. 

_I can’t do it anymore,_ she told herself. _I can’t do it I can’t do it I can’t do it I can’t—_

She did it. 

And when she got back home, stinking of putrified blood and viscera, she let Heather hold her. 

“It’s okay,” Heather told her. Petted her hair. Her heartbeat was dizzyingly strong and familiar. “What do you need?”

She thought about the blood dolls there, who’d had their eyes gouged out. She was fucking starving, actually woozy with thirst, because she hadn’t eaten since the night before and it had taken pretty much everything she had in her to finish off Andrei, but the thought of eating turned her stomach. 

Instead she turned so that her face was pressed into Heather’s neck instead of her shoulder, and listened to the sound of Heather’s blood rushing steady and soft through her veins where it damn well belonged. White noise, not dinner. She let herself believe, as dawn arrived and unconsciousness claimed her, that the next night wouldn’t be as bad.

~*~*~*~

It was when she was standing once again in LaCroix’s office, listening to him drone on about the terrible burden of being Prince, that she realized she was done.

“I’m not going to track down Nines for you,” she said flatly in the middle of his diatribe. 

He wore an infuriating expression of feigned innocence, the same mask every single vampire she’d met wore. That douchey, plausibly deniable affectation that said _We both know I’m playing you like a fiddle but we also both know you have no proof, so you might as well just lie back and think of Caine._ “I’ve called off the blood hunt,” he said patiently, as if explaining arithmetic to a particularly dull student. “As I’ve expIained, I merely want his assistance in averting war with the Kuei-Jin.” 

“I don’t care. I’m done.” 

He smiled coldly. “Need I remind you what will happen to your ghoul if something should happen to you?”

“Whatever. For weeks I’ve been doing dirty work that would have killed any of your other lackeys. I’ll take my chances.”

She was surprised to realize that she really didn’t care; at this point, she wouldn’t care even if Ming Xiao personally walked into her apartment, insulted her taste in movies, and took a shit on her couch. There was a 100% chance that LaCroix was full of shit and still had it out for Nines, but it wouldn’t matter even if the actual truth was that they were ex-lovers and this was all a convoluted vampiric plot to win him back. She was done being dragged into nightmare after nightmare, done pretending to not know she was a pawn, done pretending that everyone (herself included) was so very clever for choosing to occupy themselves with cutthroat politics instead of something normal, like orgies, or sitting around angsting about their cursed undead existences or whatever. 

Pretty much everyone had been doing their best to get her killed anyways. Might as well force them to be honest about it.

No one tried to stop her, but she could feel eyes on her as she made her way back to the cab, and again when she made the walk from the cab to her apartment. 

~*~*~*~

Heather took the news remarkably well. But then, she took pretty much everything remarkably well; one of the more fucked up side effects of being a ghoul, in the fledgling’s opinion. It seemed a nightmare situation to be so devoted to someone that you didn’t even care that an entire city of blood-sucking monsters was out to get you, so long as you got to stay by their side. It was darkly romantic in the movies, but not so much in real life—and not so much when the devotion was born of a chemical-magical imbalance rather than genuine love. 

She considered asking around for advice or help, but there was no way she trusted any of her acquaintances as far as she could throw them. Even though she knew a lot of people who hated LaCroix’s guts, she didn’t know anyone who would be willing to paint a target on their own back to help her just to stick it to him. 

It was doubtful that Damsel and Skelter would be so grateful that she hadn’t double-crossed them that they would think twice about taking her out; they’d still barely forgiven her for implicating Nines in the first place. Strauss was camarilla. After what went down with Ash, she doubted Isaac would piss on her if she was on fire. Jeanette and Therese would probably be relieved if their secret died with her. V.V. wouldn’t want to get her hands dirty by participating in the hunt, but neither would she want to get her hands dirty protecting her. The thin-bloods were gone, and couldn’t even protect themselves, anyways. Rosa had said she could trust the lone wolf and the man on the couch, but that had been back when she was the Prince’s lapdog, so who knew if it still held? Mercurio was LaCroix’s ghoul, and Beckett was… she didn’t even know how to contact him, even if she felt up to risking it. 

_Kiddo,_ Jack would probably say, _I told you the politics were gonna kill you._

It would be easier just to let it happen, to walk into Venture Tower and let them take her in, or even to go take a walk at noon. She could always command Heather to stake her to the front lawn, if she was worried that self-preservation instincts would kick in and she’d run before the sun could burn her to a crisp.

Of course, if she’d actually wanted to do things the easy way, she wouldn’t have thrown her little tantrum in LaCroix’s office, but it was a little late to second guess that.

It didn’t even take them a half hour to pack up their shit and leave town.

~*~*~*~

Even once they were out of the city, they were followed. 

She wasn’t sure if that was typical of a blood hunt or if she was just that fucking special; either way, she and Heather ended up having to hole up in cheap motels and abandoned farmhouses. 

The version of her who’d thought she was hungry before was such a fucking dumbass. 

It was too risky to feed off humans, even the sad sacks one met in seedy motels. Too easy for kindred to recognize where one of their own had been hunting. And the last thing she needed was to accidentally encroach on someone else’s hunting grounds—though she’d hate to meet the sorry bastard who made such a place their permanent home. Heather helped as much as she could, but out in werewolf country that mostly amounted to trapping small animals and keeping an eye out for werewolves or other ghouls. They’d had a couple try to pull a fast one, pretending to be housekeeping or hitchhikers or kindred with anti-camarilla sensibilities who wanted to help. Heather sent them all on their way. 

Hunger didn’t make rats taste any better, nor did it make them heal her up any more effectively. Deer and rabbits tasted a little less like ass and were a little more nourishing, but Jack had been right. Nothing compared to the first drink. 

Maybe if she’d always been on an animal-based diet… but she’d been so fucking stupid. Thinking that the politics weren’t going to get to her, after everything she saw that first night. She should have headed for the hills to live off of rats the second LaCroix quit yapping about his clemency. 

Of course, then she probably would have been blindsided by a werewolf. 

~*~*~*~

Some assholes came after her with a flamethrower—an actual fucking flamethrower—and it took her until long past midnight to shake them off and head back to the remote motel where she and Heather were holing up for the day. She almost would have preferred being blindsided by a werewolf; at least she could heal from bites and scratches without needing to drink enough blood to keep a hemophiliac in business for a year. It felt as though she’d been subjected to pretty much every obscure injury that could befall a human being in the past weeks, but burns were still the most decidedly unpleasant.

Still, it was a fairly uneventful night, right up to the point when she reached out to open the door and realized that the handle was sticky with blood. She tried to squash down the panic she felt building in her chest, but her mind was still racing with all the horrible possibilities as she flung open the door and—

—If her heart still beat, it would have stopped when she entered the room to find Heather splayed across the cheap king-sized bed, gutted like a scene out of one of the dumb horror movies she used to be a fan of before her life turned into one. The lamp had been overturned, so the light was flickering, casting the gory mess of her chest in stark relief and making the blood that drenched her torso gleam. Blood was soaking into the mattress and the stench of it—the coppery, visceral smell of the cooling blood, which was so strong that she thought even a human would be overwhelmed by it, combined with the years of debauchery the mattress had seen, which she _hoped_ only a vampire could smell—was indescribable. Hungry as she was, it didn’t even register as food. She thought, hysterically, that it was all very atmospheric. 

She stood stupidly in the doorway for a moment, just staring, scorched hands and arms throbbing, a few particularly vindictive blisters threatening to break open, before realizing that her heart may have stopped beating, but Heather’s hadn’t yet, despite the extent of her injuries. Vamp blood really was good shit, apparently. 

They wouldn’t make the same mistake twice, and neither would she.

She shut the door behind her, burnt fingers screaming in protest at the movements required to lock the damn thing, and knelt down next to the bed, listening to her increasingly thready pulse and breathing in the fading scent of her blood. Heather’s eyes were closed, eyelids fluttering subtly as if in the midst of a dream, ashen face looking all the grayer compared to the blood drying on her neck.

When she could stretch the moment no longer, she leaned in until her mouth brushed Heather’s ear and whispered, “I want to show you something.”


End file.
